Together, Hannah and I brought all of Rebecca’s framed photographs back out of the closet where they had been hidden, and we hung them again on the living-room walls, in the light, where they belonged.

And then we did something new.

We built a display cabinet for the hallway, a real wooden one, with our own hands over a couple of weekends, and in it we placed the things of Rebecca’s that mattered most: her old journals, the family photo albums, her handwritten recipe cards, the small keepsakes that Hannah wanted to be sure were kept safe.

Building that cabinet together turned out to be one of the most important things we ever did, though it had started as a simple practical project.